Spirit And Spirituality Philosophical Trends In Late Modern Pneumatology

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Pneuma 30 (2008) 271-287

Dialogue

Spirit and Spirituality:

Philosophical Trends in Late Modern Pneumatology

F. LeRon Shults

University of Agder, Gimlemoen, 4604 Kristiansand, Norway

leron.shults@uia.no

Abstract

This dialogue piece reviews some of the key developments in the doctrine of the Holy Spirit in late modern theology that have contributed to the scholarly and practical integration of pneu- matology and Christian spirituality. Shifts in the meaning and use of three concepts — matter, person, and force — have played a particularly influential role in these developments. These trends are illustrated in several recent pneumatological proposals. The final section outlines some new directions for the ongoing task of reforming pneumatology.

Keywords

pneumatology, spirituality

Introduction

Up until the last few decades, most explorations of pneumatology began with a complaint about the material paucity and methodological poverty of treatments of the third person of the Trinity in the history of theology since the Enlightenment. Today, however, we are in the midst of an aca- demic revival of interest in the Holy Spirit. The rapid growth and diversity of this literature makes it difficult to provide an overview that adequately presents the complexity of recent developments in the doctrine. This is a pleasant predicament, a problem that ought to please us. The Christian experience of the outpouring of the Spirit of God is both disturbing and comforting, and we ought to expect nothing less when we turn to the task of theological reflection on this empowering divine presence.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 DOI: 10.1163/157007408X346410

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It is not my intention here to provide a comprehensive survey,1 but I would like to outline three philosophical shifts that work together to support what I see as one of the most dominant trends in late modern pneumatology: the growing tendency to integrate refl ection on the Spirit with refl ection on spiri- tuality. (The most recent annual meeting of the Scandinavian T eological Society took “Spirit and Spirituality” as its theme, and this essay is based on my opening plenary lecture for that conference.)

Although the term spirituality is notoriously dificult to defi ne, for our pur- poses here it sufices to say that we are dealing broadly with the ways in which we interpret and attend to our experience of transformation in relation to God and our neighbors. Most of the general developments — and many of the con- crete proposals — in recent pneumatology are oriented toward or fl ow out of this concern. For example, the growing interest in and generative use of the theological concept of the divine Spirit among those exploring issues in feminist and liberation theology, ecology, politics, ecumenism, and the astonishing expansion of Pentecostalism are explicitly related to questions of spiritual trans- formation.

The connection between Spirit and spirituality seems increasingly obvious to us now, but it has not always been so. Since the early modern period pneu- matology proper has registered hardly any eff ect on the literature of spiritual- ity. Conversely, many systematic theological treatments of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit have been relatively detached from the practical concerns of spiri- tual pilgrims and directors. The healing of this dichotomy has been facilitated by a broader and growing interest in integrating spirituality and theology in general.2

Although it is inextricably linked to the liturgical and practical space and time of Christian life, systematic theology is a conceptual endeavor, and so it makes sense to organize a theoretical presentation of trends around the concep- tual shifts that underlie and support recent developments in pneumatology. Any taxonomy will have its limitations, but I hope that one of the virtues of this

1

For an exploration of these shifts within a broader treatment of developments in pneumatol- ogy throughout the history of the biblical tradition, cf. F. LeRon Shults and Andrea Hollings- worth, The Holy Spirit (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, forthcoming).

2

Cf. Mark A. McIntosh, Mystical T eology: The Integrity of Spirituality and T eology (Malden, MA: Blackwell,1998); Philip Sheldrake, Spirituality and T eology: Christian Living and the Doc- trine of God, (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998); Simon Chan, Spiritual T eology: A Systematic Study of the Christian Life (Downer’s Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1998); F. LeRon Shults and Steven Sandage, Transforming Spirituality: Integrating T eology and Psycholog y (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006).

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approach will be that it helps to clarify and support this broader trend toward integrating our understanding of Spirit and our practice of spirituality.

Each of the three major parts of this essay identifi es a broad conceptual shift in late modern philosophy (and so theology and science) that is particularly relevant for pneumatology. I will attempt to show how developments in the use and interpretation of the concepts of matter, person, and force have contrib- uted to the renewal of interest in and hopeful reconstruction of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. As I hope to show, focusing on these concepts can help elucidate the connections between developments in theology and shifts in late modern culture. Each section provides a brief historical overview of the philo- sophical shift and then points to several examples of the infl uence of that particular trend in contemporary treatments of the Spirit. The paper concludes by indicating some of the implications of these trends as we look for new directions in reforming pneumatology.

Pneumatology and the Concept of Matter

In Western philosophy “matter” has often been negatively defined: that is, it has been conceptualized in dialectical opposition to the concept of “spirit” (or some other term signifying the immaterial, whether form, soul, energy, life, mind, or thought). This basic metaphysical dualism was particularly evident in Plato, who drew a line between the changing material world and the unchanging reality of the Forms, and in Descartes, who insisted that “extended thing” and “thinking thing” are the two mutually exclusive and exhaustive ontological categories. When the divine Spirit is quarantined on one side of this conceptual bifurcation, it is difficult to make sense of the idea that an unextended, immaterial, and unchanging divine Thing can have an effect on extended, material, and changing things.

In the early modern period during which Protestant theology was being forged, this conundrum led some thinkers toward materialism (Hobbes: every- thing is material, including the Creator) and others toward idealism (Berkeley: everything is immaterial, including creation). Insofar as the concept of “spirit” was merely defi ned negatively in distinction from “matter” ( immaterial), it was dificult for theologians to make sense of the relation of the divine Spirit to the material world without inappropriately setting them side by side (as in deism) or confl ating them into one substance (as in pantheism).

The first trend to which I wish to draw attention is the tendency in late modernity to resist such a dualism. In contemporary physics “matter” itself

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is no longer conceptualized in terms of extended substances but as wrapped up dynamically within the concept of “energy” (E=mc2). The world is not composed of discrete material “bodies” that move “through” space and time; rather, space, time, matter, and energy are all bound together in dynamic relational fi elds that warp and knot in ways that we experience as bodily forms.

This has made it possible for theorists in the sciences of emergent complex- ity to conceptualize what has traditionally been called “spirit” (or “form” or “life”) as in some sense a qualifi cation of matter, that is, as related to matter in some positive way without being simply reducible to it. In its concern to avoid pantheism, early modern theology was sometimes willing to accept a radical dualism between Spirit and (material) world. Many of the constructive pro- posals in late modern pneumatology are motivated by the pernicious eff ects of this dualism and aim to conceptualize the Spirit in a way that better accounts for the experience that this divine presence embraces, pervades, and trans- forms what we call “matter.” Let us look at some examples.

In After the Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources Outside the Modern West Eugene Rogers argues that “to think about the Spirit, you have to think materially, because, in Christian terms, the Spirit has befriended mat- ter.”3 This befriending is for the sake of the Incarnation but includes the whole of creation, over which the Spirit creatively hovers, and takes concrete shape in the mortal embodiment of believers, in whom the Spirit dwells. Drawing from a variety of ancient and modern Eastern resources (including theological texts, liturgical texts, and art), Rogers off ers a pneumatology that emphasizes the Spirit as excessive Gift (“superfl uity”) both in the Trinity and in creation. He explores four iconic New Testament scenes — resurrection, annunciation, baptism, and transfi guration — and seeks to uncover the ways in which the Holy Spirit reveals herself as the divine Person who gives and evokes abundant gratuity.

Rogers does not conceptualize the Spirit as simply contrasted to matter but as that presence which transfi gures matter, makes it sacramental. He argues that this opens up new ways of thinking about “material” images of the Spirit in Scripture, such as water, oil, and fi re. He suggests that our fear of too inti- mately connecting the Spirit and embodiment is a sign of covert Nestorian- ism, and insists that the basis of such an intimacy is grounded in the distinctive role of the divine Spirit who rests on the body of the Son in the Incarnation.

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Eugene Rogers, After the Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources Outside the Mod- ern West (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 58.

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Pentecostal theologian Amos Yong has also explicitly argued against the assumption that the category of “spirit” must be metaphysically opposed to “matter” in his contribution to The Work of the Spirit: Pentecostalism and Pneu- matology, edited by Michael Welker. Rejecting the dualism of human body and human spirit, Yong suggests that a holistic understanding of personhood, such as that developed in Philip Clayton’s theory of emergence, is more con- sistent with the biblical picture of human being. He observes that “biblical narrative acknowledges the dependence and interconnectedness between the human spirit and its material substrate in a way that is consistent with the emergent monist thesis.”4

But Yong wants to expand this analysis in an explicitly pneumatological way, that is, to explore the implications of non-dualist metaphysics for our understanding of the relation of the divine Spirit to creation. He is critical of some aspects of Clayton’s proposal but believes that his metaphysics can be theologically bolstered by attending to the biblical emphasis on the Spirit’s presence both over creation and in creation. Yong’s approach also illustrates another growing trend in pneumatology — explicit engagement with contem- porary science in reconstructive theological proposals on the Holy Spirit. One of the hallmarks of feminist theology is a revaluation of embodiment, and so it is not surprising that so many feminist reconstructions of pneumatol- ogy begin with a challenge to ancient Greek and early modern forms of the dualism between material body and immaterial spirit. Christian theology has too often fallen prey to the temptation to ignore or denigrate physicality, focusing instead on intellectual dimensions of human life and the experience of God. This dualism has sometimes led to the destruction and degradation of the earth — which is merely material — and to the oppression of women insofar as their gender came to be identifi ed in relation to their bodies rather than their minds.

In Women, Earth and Creator Spirit Elizabeth Johnson argues that the mar- ginalization of women and the exploitation of the earth are closely related. She also explicitly links her understanding of the Spirit to a call to spiritual conver- sion. Learning to care for one another and the earth will require us to “assume our responsibility as co-partners with the Creator Spirit.”

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The dualism between

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Amos Yong, “Ruach, the Primordial Chaos, and the Breath of Life: Emergence T eory and the Creation Narratives in Pneumatological Perspective,” in M. Welker, ed., The Work of the Spirit: Pneumatology and Pentecostalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), 183-204, at 198.

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Elizabeth Johnson, Women, Earth and Creator Spirit ( New York and Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1993), 63.

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matter and spirit reinforces the tendency to separate the ethical and political dimensions of embodied Christian practice from the intellectual dimensions of life with and in the Spirit of God.

In Sensing the Spirit Rebecca Button Prichard points to the ways in which the Holy Spirit fi lls, surrounds, and transforms our fi ve senses — hearing, see- ing, tasting, touching, and smelling — all of which are “material.”

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She attempts to move beyond the revulsion so many Christian theologians have expressed toward the human body in general and the female body in particular by carefully attending to the Spirit’s intimate presence in the sensory realm. Prichard calls for an interpretation of God the Spirit as “tangible” and “earthy,” which she believes is closer to the biblical understanding than the “numinous, ghostly, and impersonal” interpretations that have so often characterized Christian pneumatology.

The growing interest in responding to the ecological crisis with a view of the Spirit as the divine force that sustains all forms of life is another illustration of the impact of this conceptual shift on pneumatology. For example, Mark Wal- lace’s call for a “green spirituality” in his Fragments of the Spirit: Nature, Violence and the Renewal of Creation is one such attempt to link refl ection on the Spirit with a holistic spirituality.7 We might also have included here illustrations from liberation theology,8 which also often treats pneumatology in ways that resist a dichotomy between experience of the divine Spirit and embodied transforma- tion, and tends to view salvation in terms not only of the rescue of the indi- vidual soul but also of the redemption of persons in community.

Pneumatology and the Concept of Person

It is difficult to exaggerate the influence of Boethius’ definition of person as “an individual substance of a rational nature” on Christian theology in general and pneumatology in particular. This way of conceptualizing personhood was shaped in part by Augustine, who emphasized the pow- ers (faculties) of the intellect and will in the individual soul. In order to avoid tritheism, which would seem to follow if this definition of person was directly applied to each member of the Trinity without qualification,

6

Rebecca Button Prichard, Sensing the Spirit: The Holy Spirit in Feminist Perspective (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 1999).

7

Mark Wallace, Fragments of the Spirit: Nature, Violence and the Renewal of Creation (New York: Continuum, 1996).

8

E.g., Jose Comblin, The Holy Spirit and Liberation (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock), 2004.

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some Western theologians were tempted toward modalism, the view that God is “a” person with three modes of being.

T inking of God as a single person, rather than three persons, led many medieval theologians in this stream of the tradition, including T omas Aqui- nas, to speak of the Spirit as the “will” of God (and the Son as the “intellect” of God). The rise of nominalism, with its focus on the particular, hardened the Boethian emphasis on the individual. Furthermore, the reliance on the cate- gory of “substance” contributed to a view of persons in which their “relations” were only accidental. This philosophical predilection contributed to the rise and complicated the discussion of the Western notion of the Spirit’s proces- sion from the Father “and the Son” (fi lioque ).

This brings us to our second trend: the shift in late modern psychology toward more relational concepts of human personhood. The early modern Protestant Scholastics — both Lutheran and Reformed — had for the most part followed the Augustinian-T omistic model of personhood in both their anthropology and their pneumatology. Up until the second part of the twen- tieth century, most theologians in these traditions continued to articulate the doctrine of the Holy Spirit in the context of a divine faculty psychology, and focused much of their energy in relation to this doctrine on defending the fi lioque clause.

Today, however, the basic unit of analysis in contemporary conceptions of personhood is no longer the isolated individual, and the notion of the intellect and will as “faculties” of a substantial soul has been challenged by neurobiol- ogy and other sciences. To be a person is to be in relation. Personhood is medi- ated by relations to others within systems of relations. This conceptual shift has ramifi cations for pneumatology, opening up possibilities for retrieving and refi guring traditional language of the three “persons” of the Trinity. We turn now to examples of theologians who have attempted to take advantage of this conceptual shift in reconstructing the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.

Pneumatology plays a role in virtually all of Jürgen Moltmann’s works. In The Trinity and the Kingdom , for example, he explicitly rejects the Boethian defi nition of person (with its emphasis on individual substance) and develops a trinitarian model that appropriates more relational concepts. He also argues that we must think of the personhood of the Spirit diff erently from that of the Father and the Son; their modes of being person-in-relation are not identical.9

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Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom , trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: For- tress Press, 1993), 171-87.

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Moltmann’s most detailed treatment of pneumatology appears in The Spirit of Life. T ere he pays special attention to the human experience of life, which is interpreted theologically as life “in the Spirit.” The personhood of the Spirit is spelled out most explicitly in the fi nal chapter. After pointing to the impor- tance of biblical metaphors for the Spirit (such as water, fi re, mother, tempest, and so forth), Moltmann suggests the following defi nition: “The personhood of God the Holy Spirit is the loving, self-communicating, out-fanning and out-pouring presence of the eternal divine life of the triune God.”10 Here and elsewhere Moltmann emphasizes the way in which the Spirit brings salvation not simply by altering the individual soul but by liberating the whole com- munity into new forms of life-giving fellowship.

Recent proposals for a renewal of Spirit Christology also illustrate the impact of this conceptual shift on pneumatology. This movement is part of broader developments in twentieth-century theology that have struggled to revive a robust doctrine of the Trinity. In his contribution to Advents of the Spirit, which contains several important essays on the doctrine of the Spirit, David Coff ey argues that Spirit Christology is the best mode of access to a theology of the Trinity.11 He does not follow those early church fathers for whom “Spirit” in this phrase refers simply to the divine element in Christ, but insists that here we are dealing with the third Person of the Trinity. Drawing on some texts from Augustine and Cyril of Alexandria, which hint that the Incarnation can be understood as the Father’s radical gift of the Holy Spirit to the humanity of Christ, Coff ey proposes that we think of the presence of the Spirit as in some sense constituting the personhood of Christ. He argues that Spirit Christology can and should incorporate (while going beyond) the insights of Logos Christology, which focuses on understanding the mystery of the Incarnation basically in terms of the hypostatic union between divine Logos and the human Jesus, with little or no appeal to the Holy Spirit. As Cof- fey makes clear, some such radical refi guring of categories will be required to move beyond the ecumenical impasses in the fi lioque debate.

In fact the shift toward more relational conceptions of personhood has played a signifi cant role in ecumenical discussions between the West and the East over the doctrine of the Trinity and the understanding of the Holy Spirit.

10

Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life: A Universal Afirmation trans. Margaret Kohl (Min- neapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 289.

11

David Coff ey, “Spirit Christology and the Trinity,” in Advents of the Spirit: An Introduction to the Current Study of Pneumatology, ed. Bradford E. Hinze and D. Lyle Dabney (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2001), 315-38.

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One of the major contributors to this dialogue has been Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas. In his infl uential work Being as Communion, he argues that for the Cappadocians and many other Eastern theologians “person” is not a subset of “substance” as it sometimes appears in Western defi nitions. Rather, being itself is constituted by the personhood of the Father in communion with the Son and the Spirit. One of the reasons the East has resisted the fi lioque , he argues, is that it inappropriately prioritizes Christology over pneumatology, which in turn can obscure the way in which the eschatological and commu- nion-creating presence of the Spirit shapes the personhood of the Son and the life of the church.12

In an essay on “Pneumatology and the Importance of the Person,” Zizioulas explores the way in which the conceptual tool of “substance” (and so homoou- sios) functioned in the second ecumenical council (Constantinople).13 He argues that the main point was to underscore the distinction between created and uncreated, with the Holy Spirit clearly understood as the latter. He hints that part of the problem with the fi lioque debates is the West’s reliance on the philosophical category of substance as the primary way to uphold this intu- ition; instead we should follow Constantinople’s emphasis on the way in which the life-giving Spirit makes possible the communion of the created with the uncreated divine nature.

Another infl uential proposal that illustrates how this shift in the concept of person shapes pneumatology is Michael Welker’s God the Spirit.14 His overall project is to articulate an understanding of experiences of God’s Spirit that takes account of the diverse biblical testimonies and engages the skepticism of the contemporary world. The book begins with the problem of talking realisti- cally about experiencing the Spirit in a global context where, on the one hand, God is typically conceived (if at all) as distant while, on the other hand, move- ments such as liberation, feminist, and Pentecostal theology emphasize the immanence of God.

After outlining early (relatively unclear) biblical testimonies about the Spirit, Welker points to (chronologically) later texts in Scripture that link the Spirit’s power to justice and peace. He argues that the life and ministry of Jesus Christ reveal the concrete presence of the Spirit of truth and of love,

12

John Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Press, 1997).

13

John Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, ed. Paul McPartlan (London: T&T Clark, 2006.

14

Michael Welker, God the Spirit, trans. John F. Hoff meyer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994).

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and describes the outpouring of the Spirit as an action of liberation and of overcoming the world, not through escapism but as a public “force fi eld” in which God’s life and presence are made known. In the last chapter, Welker urges a move beyond Aristotelian and Hegelian concepts of Spirit and invites us to think of the “public person” of the Spirit, who is “God in the midst of creation.”

Welker’s notion of the public personhood of the Spirit, who may be con- ceived as a “fi eld of force” that constitutes public force fi elds and that generates a “domain of resonance” into which embodied human persons are liberated and invited to orient themselves toward others in concrete acts of love, also illustrates the intrinsic link between philosophical shifts in the concept of per- son and shifts in the concepts of matter and force.

Pneumatology and the Concept of Force

Another conceptual shift that influences the doctrine of the Holy Spirit is the move away from early modern mechanistic and linear conceptions of natural motion, which focused primarily on the efficiency of past causes that determine present and future effects. When the concept of movement could be explained by Platonic active immaterial principles or by Aristotelian entelechies and final causes, it was relatively easy to conceptualize the role of the “spiritual” as a force in the cosmos. In classical Newtonian mechanics, however, force was understood in terms of the impact of masses (material substances) on the inertial frame of other masses, whose acceleration and distance may be measured in the context of absolute space and time.

The formula F=ma leaves little room (or no room, Laplace would later say) for the divine Spirit to fi t into such a linear chain of determined mechanical causes. The articulation of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit in the early modern period was further complicated by reliance on the idea of God as first eficient cause of all motion in the created world. The application of this concept of force to the divine eventually led to the metaphor of God as a Watchmaker, designing and winding up the mechanical clockwork of the cosmos.

Our third trend has to do with shifts in late modern philosophy and science that have led to more dynamic, non-linear, and holistic concepts of force or movement. When mass and motion (velocity) were integrated within fi elds of energy (E=mc2), this opened up new possibilities for conceptualizing the human experience of temporality and causation. We may think, for example, of Georg Picht’s prioritizing of the future, of Whitehead’s notion of an actual

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occasion’s prehension of its subjective aim, or more recently of Holmes Rolston’s idea of “possibility space” into which organisms emerge.

When theology was dominated by a past-oriented concept of force, it was tempting to fi t the power of the Spirit into the same kind of deterministic scheme that explained all other changes, leading to a focus on the ordered movement of individual souls through the “states” of salvation — the so-called ordo salutis. Twentieth-century interest in holistic and relational concepts of time provided a new context for theologians to explore and explicate anew the emphasis in the biblical tradition on the dynamic relation between the escha- tological presence of the Creator Spirit and the coming-to-be creation. I turn now to a brief description of four theologians who have taken advantage of this opportunity.

One of the best-known proponents of linking the power of the Spirit of God to the concept of futurity is Wolfhart Pannenberg. In volume 2 of his Systematic T eology , he summarizes his position: “We are thus to think of the dynamic of the divine Spirit as a working fi eld linked to time and space — to time by the power of the future that gives creatures their own present and duration, and to space by the simultaneity of creatures in their duration. From the standpoint of the creature, origin from the future of the Spirit has the appearance of the past. But the working of the Spirit constantly encounters the creature as its future, which embraces its origin and its possible fulfi lment.”

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Pannenberg was among the first theologians to utilize the concept of fi elds of force, developed by Maxwell and Faraday, in the reconstructive articulation of pneumatology. Although this move has been highly controversial, it has been appropriated and refi gured by many others, including Welker (see above). Here again we have an illustration of a trend that cuts transversally across the conceptual shifts we have been exploring: the willingness to engage contempo- rary science. In several of the essays in his Towards a T eology of Nature ,16 Pan- nenberg attempted to articulate a Christian understanding of the Spirit that makes theological use of the concepts of energy fi elds in general and of the emergence of self-transcendence and openness to the future in human organ- isms in particular.

Another important example is Robert Jenson, who develops a robust pneu- matology in which — to use one of his favourite phrases — Pentecost is a peer

15

Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic T eology , vol. 2, trans. G. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 102.

16

Wolfhart Pannenberg, Toward a T eology of Nature: Essays on Science and Faith ed. Ted Peters (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993).

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of Easter. In his essay “What is the Point of Trinitarian T eology?” Jenson summarizes his position: “the Spirit is God as the Power of his own and our future; and it is that the Spirit is God as the Power of his own future, as the Power of a future that is truly ‘unexpected’ and yet connected, also for him, that the Spirit is a distinct identity of and in God.”17 Jenson accepts the East- ern Orthodox intuition that the Father is the archē of deity, but wants to bal- ance this by speaking of the Spirit as the “End” (or telos) of all God’s ways. The temporal infi nity of God is the unsurpassability of the event of the Spirit as God who comes to us from the last future.

Jenson spells this out in more detail in volume 1of his Systematic T eology : the Spirit is “at the End of all God’s ways because he is the End of all God’s ways. The Spirit is the Liveliness of the divine life because he is the Power of the divine future.” The Spirit is the one as whom God is future to himself, and thereby “liberates God the Father from himself . . . to be the actual archē of deity.” The Spirit not only liberates the Father for the Son, but also liberates the Son “from and for the Father,” who as the one who is begotten and liber- ated “reconciles the Father with the future his Spirit is.”18

Several of the themes we have already observed come together in the pro- posal of Bernard Cooke in his recent Power and the Spirit of God. Pointing to the paradigm shift in the view of “power” that has emerged out of social scien- tifi c and literary critical analyses of human life (including the human relation to nature), Cooke introduces his project with a comment that nicely supports the thesis I have been defending in this section. He suggests that developments in the late modern conceptualization of power represent “what may be the most radical shift in mentality to touch Christianity in eighteen hundred years.”19

Cooke also wants to emphasize the eschatological and life-giving power of the Spirit, in contrast to the forceful and coercive plays of power in public life, which postmodern analysis has unveiled. Far from implying that the power of the Spirit is apolitical, he argues that “divine Spirit-power works through non- violent service. Instead of coercion, God’s Spirit is an invitation to greater levels of life and happiness.”20 Cooke employs the metaphor of “embrace” as a

17

Robert Jenson, “What is the Point of Trinitarian T eology?” in Trinitarian T eology Today , ed. C. Schwöbel (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 31-43, at 41.

18

Robert Jenson, Systematic T eology , vol. 1 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 157-61.

19

Bernard Cooke, Power and the Spirit of God (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 7.

20

Ibid., 185.

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way of conceptualizing the Spirit’s power of love, the divine “outreaching” in loving self-gift that invites the other into the freedom of friendship.

Denis Edwards’ Breath of Life: A T eology of the Creator Spirit provides another example of a refi gured pneumatology that takes seriously the concep- tual shift in the concept of force in late modern philosophy and science. Edwards places his reconstruction of the doctrine of the Spirit in the context of the whole history of the evolving and expanding universe, leading him to speak of the Spirit as “the immanent divine principle” that enables the cosmos to evolve by breathing life into a universe of creatures.

Building on Basil’s idea of the Spirit as the one who brings all things to perfection, Edwards emphasizes the dynamic eschatological presence of the Spirit who enfolds all human beings in grace, brings about the Christ event, and draws the church into communion with God. Edwards appreciates Rah- ner’s emphasis on God as the “Absolute Future” of all of creation, but attempts to develop this insight further in terms of an explicitly trinitarian theology of the Spirit of God.21 The Creator Spirit is not simply the “will” of God that forces creatures along a predetermined time-line, but an intimate presence that is “making all things new” by calling them to share in the eter- nal trinitarian life.

New Directions for Reforming Pneumatology

Before providing a brief critical evaluation of these conceptual shifts, let me make two methodological observations. First, my identification of three different trends in pneumatology has been for sake of analysis and should not obscure the way in which they are often woven together in the fabric of contemporary theology. In fact many of the exemplars explored above explicitly engage all three of these developments in their reconstructive efforts. Given the limited space of this article I have not been able to list all of the creative proposals that illustrate these shifts in the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.

For example, Sigurd Bergmann’s Creation Set Free: The Spirit as Liberator of Nature also demonstrates the convergence of all three shifts. In his critical appropriation of Gregory of Nazianzus’ cosmic pneumatology, Bergmann iden- tifi es and appreciates the Cappadocian’s emphasis on the Spirit’s indwelling of

21

Denis Edwards, Breath of Life: A T eology of the Creator Spirit (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004), 34, 46.

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corporeal human beings, on the Spirit’s enhancement of community, and on the Spirit’s vivifi cation and consummation of the cosmos.

22

T is interweaving of themes may also be observed in general theological movements such as liberation theology, wherein one fi nds a deep concern for embodiment, com- munity, and openness to eschatological transformation.

Second, in what follows I pay special attention to ways in which these phil- osophical shifts have impacted (or can impact) the Christian understanding and facilitation of spiritual transformation, but it is important to note that there are certainly other signifi cant developments in pneumatology that ought also to be more carefully explored. For example, it would be helpful to explore ways in which these shifts have played a role in opening up new possibilities for interreligious dialogue, wherein one fi nds a growing willingness among Christian theologians to recognize the redemptive presence of the divine Spirit among all cultures.

What are we to make of these trends and where do we go from here? I have not tried to hide my enthusiasm for each of these conceptual shifts. As I indi- cated in the introduction to this essay, one key criterion for evaluation is the extent to which our formulations in the doctrine of the Holy Spirit facilitate the transformation of our spiritual practices. My interest in “reforming pneu- matology,” therefore, is oriented not only by the need for conceptual reformu- lation, but also by the hope that our speech about the Spirit might function reformatively in the church and the world. Judgments about the success of particular proposals and practices will be shaped by our own embodied and social contexts, but we can search together for ways to recover and refi gure the intuitions of the biblical tradition as we engage contemporary philosophy, sci- ence, and culture in dialogue.

Each of the three conceptual shifts seems to provide support for the general trend in contemporary theology toward making an explicit connection between the doctrine of the Holy Spirit and the facilitation of embodied, com- munal, and hopeful forms of holistic spirituality.

A pneumatology in which the divine Spirit is understood as an all-embrac- ing and all-pervading dynamic presence, in which all creaturely spatio-tempo- ral forms of energized “material” live and move and have their being, invites more relational, holistic, and embodied practices in spirituality.

A pneumatology in which the divine Spirit is understood as eternally with, for, and in communal relation vis-à-vis the Father and the Son, welcoming

22

Sigurd Bergmann, Creation Set Free: The Spirit as Liberator of Nature , trans. Douglas Stott (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 154-55.

14

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285

creatures to participate in the divine communion, invites models of spiritual- ity that tend more carefully to the social formation of persons.

A pneumatology in which the divine Spirit is understood as the promising presence of Eternity to time, constituting the creaturely experience of temporal- ity precisely by calling all things to share in the absolute Beauty of God, invites the exploration of forms of spiritual life in which the opening up of the future is interpreted as pure gift, liberating persons as agents of hope in the world.

Nevertheless, each of these conceptual shifts brings challenges as well as opportunities. We must appropriate them critically. And so as we orient our- selves toward reforming pneumatology in our contemporary context, I con- clude by identifying three critical tasks that face us as systematic theologians. T ese pneumatological issues are not isolated from the overall process of reconstructing systematic theology, which means that we must attend to ways in which developments in the doctrine of God, theological anthropology, and other loci also shape our work in the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.23

The first critical task is to present a Christian understanding of the relation between God and the world that overcomes the problems of dualism (or deism) without collapsing into the opposite problems associated with monism (or pantheism), that is, without confl ating the concepts of Spirit and matter. We are helped in this case by the twentieth-century retrieval of apophatic the- ology with its careful refusal to conceptualize God (or the divine Spirit) as one type of being or substance defi ned in comparison with or in contrast to crea- turely beings (or creaturely being itself). If we think of divine Infi nity only in terms of indefi nite extension of creaturely attributes, or as the negation of fi nitude, then we would have a concept of the Infi nite that was itself limited by its determination in relation to the fi nite, which is to say, itself fi nite. In the same way, speaking of divine Spirituality as truly Infi nite in relation to the (energized-spatio-temporal) material world can help us imaginatively interpret our experience of that intensely disturbing and comforting incomparable pres- ence that is closer to us than we are to ourselves.

Another critical task will be presenting pneumatology in a way that avoids not only the modalist tendencies of psychological models of the Trinity, but also the tritheistic leanings of some of the social trinitarian models that have emerged in the last half century. Here we ought to move beyond thinking of the three “persons” of the Trinity as three repetitions of the same kind of ratio- nal individual, who happen to take diff erent roles. The way in which human creatures are called to be “persons” follows the form of the “personality “ of the

23

Shults and Sandage, Transforming Spirituality.

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eternal Son, which was manifested in the life of Jesus of Nazareth — facing the eternal Father in faithful, loving, and hopeful dependence on the eternal Spirit. We still speak of the perichoretic being-in-relation of the Father and the Spirit as “personal,” but the way in which they are mutually present to, in, and for one another and the Son is the eternal ground of the evocation of the human experience of personality — not simply two more examples of it.24 The third critical task that emerges in light of our analysis is depicting the power of the divine Spirit in a way that escapes the constraints of early modern fatalism and voluntarism without giving up on the idea of God as the absolute ground of all things. Here I commend the late modern renewal of eschato- logical ontology, the intuition that in some sense creaturely being is consti- tuted by the coming of God. The so-called turn to Futurity has its own implicit dangers, such as the temptation to speak of a reversal of causation that col- lapses into post-determinism. Nevertheless, we might fi nd resources in this conceptual shift for articulating a reformative pneumatology in the context of an overarching understanding of the Creator as the One from whom, through whom, and to whom all things are (Rom 11:36). Such a doctrine of the Holy Spirit can emphasize that the trinitarian God is the ultimate origin of all things precisely as the conditioning goal of all things.

The current trend in pneumatology that strives to link Spirit and Spiritual- ity in so many diverse and creative ways commends itself for another reason. It quickens in us a sense of hope that the doctrine of the Holy Spirit may itself come to be articulated in a way that is inherently Gospel. The disturbing and comforting presence of the Spirit of the trinitarian God is good news indeed, for our embodied desire for an open future of peaceful communion is consti- tuted, upheld, and fulfi lled by this all-embracing advent of the infi nitely life- giving eschatological force that renews all things by calling them into a transformative participation in the life of Eternity.

Come, Creator Spirit!

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